


Rubik's Cube

by simplyprologue



Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Post Episode AU: s01e07 5/1, Season/Series 01, Unresolved Romantic Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-17
Updated: 2014-04-24
Packaged: 2018-01-19 17:17:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1477687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Saying "I love you" won't solve all your problems. Those you still have to figure out for yourself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Colors in Rows

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** So obviously this veers very AU after the end of "5/1," but I'm still going to try to follow the rough series of events from 1.08-1.10. Which means that unless I say otherwise, things are proceeding like they did in canon, even if motivations or interpersonal conflicts have changed. So instead of going through scenes you can just watch, I'll be skimming canon events and focusing more on changed motivations and filling in gaps. 
> 
> Cool? Cool. 
> 
> Thanks as always to Meg.

She wakes up a little after 6 AM, staring blearily at her alarm clock, the little red numbers illuminating that side of her bedroom. Stares, and then moans—they didn’t leave the studio until well after midnight and she’s only had a few hours of fairly restless sleep. Pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes, MacKenzie figures it’s probably her body thinking it’s back in the war; Osama Bin Laden’s capture would probably be the night for that.

It’s not like she spent twenty-six months in al-Qaeda controlled pockets of the Middle East.

She should have just slept at the office.

By habit, she reaches for her BlackBerry on her nightstand, frowning sleepily when she sees that the battery’s died. Fumbles for her charger, she leans half out of bed to pull the cord towards her, and plugs it in. Waits a moment, and then turns her phone on to see if she’s missed anything important.

_Three missed calls._

The first is from Will. At a little past three, she sees, scrolling through the log. Another from Jim, and the last from one of her military sources.

_One new voicemail._

From Will.

She sighs. Considering the general state that she left him in—even though he somehow got himself articulately and eloquently through broadcast without flubbing _Obama_ and _Osama_ even once—this ought to be interesting.

Entering the password for her voicemail, she presses her phone to her ear and rubs the sleep from her eyes.

_Hey, it’s me. Will. I swear I’m not saying this because I’m high, and if the answer is no then just do me a favor and don’t call me back or bring it up or… anything. But I have to tell you… I mean, after tonight, I really wanna tell you…  that I’ve never stopped loving you. Do you… do you still love me? Or can you? You were spectacular tonight… Can you believe we got Obama?_

Briefly, she considers the possibility that she’s still asleep, blinking into the relative darkness of her bedroom. Because she’s had this dream before, and if this is just Zoloft fucking with her…

And then an automated voice asks her what she wants to do with the message and she realizes that no…

She’s awake.

Hands shaking, she hits the end call button, sits up, and lays the phone between her legs.

_I’ve never stopped loving you._

Paralyzed, she feels her heart surging through her chest, into her breastbone, pumping adrenaline through her veins. Breathing through pursed lips, she casts her gaze out her window, letting her eyes slide out of focus. The bright Times Square billboards blur into a neon mess, and she counts to ten.

She has to call him back.

Because she can’t let him think that she doesn’t love him. She doesn’t know the wisest way to answer, because she knows Will is going to sober up and he’s going to get angry at her again, and he’s going to regret calling her. But if she doesn’t answer, he’ll be… she doesn’t know what he’ll be, but angrier, probably. And hurt. And she’s already hurt him enough.

So she has to call.

Carefully, she dials.

Tries to keep her breathing controlled, calm.

Prays that it goes to voicemail, because she doesn’t think she can do this if he picks up.

By the third ring, her entire body is shaking, mind racing through all the things she wishes she had said to him four years ago as she was leaving.

_You’ve reached Will McAvoy. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible._

Biting her lip until her tongue is touched by the metallic taste of blood, she waits for the tone, picking at her cuticles.

“Hey, it’s me.” Taking a steadying breath, she flexes her fingers into her sheets rather than make her fingers bleed. “I got your voicemail. And I know—I know you said that it wasn’t because you’re high. But I—I know you, Will. And I guess I’m saying if you want an out, just hang up right now.”

That’s good, right? She should give him a chance to decide that last night didn’t happen? He wasn’t sober, obviously, when he called her. And figuring how much he’s had, Mac figures he probably isn’t sober now, and probably won’t be until well into the morning. She’d be… it wouldn’t be right. If she had picked up the phone, he would have been in no place to consent to anything. The reverse is also true.

She keeps going, trying to smooth the tremors from her voice. Tentatively, because even though she’s had these words rattling around in her head for years, he might actually listen to them now. And then she’s going to get up to go to work, and he’s going to be there.

He’s going to be there, in the newsroom, and they’re going to make a choice. Because there’s no quick fix for them. They’re going to make a choice.

Unless he makes his first. And hangs up.

In which case she’ll survive, because that’s the status quo. It’s familiar. And comfortable. And miserable.

She keeps going.

“But if… you don’t hang up… I never stopped loving you. And I know that you probably don’t believe me, but that’s what I was trying to tell you. In all those emails, all the voicemails.” The hundreds of emails and dozens of voicemails that he deleted. MacKenzie realizes that her voice is shaking despite her best efforts, and squeezes her hand tighter into her bedclothes. “I didn’t tell you about Brian to break up with you. It was… I know this sounds pathetic, and it _is_ pathetic, but I somehow got into my thirties without ever actually being in a serious relationship.”

She didn’t _want_ to be in one, before Will. All MacKenzie had been focused on was her career, travelling from place to place, staying just long enough to climb the next rung on the ladder, be shuffled up the ranks. From intern to assistant to associate producer to senior producer to executive producer, winning National Press Awards and Scripps Howards and Emmys and a Peabody. It was easier. Comfortable.

Because she was afraid of what it would mean, if she let anyone in. She grew up as a foreigner in foreign lands, making friends she’d inevitably leave behind for the next assignment. Somewhere along the way she lost the inclination to let people in, or if she did, she did it knowing she’d leave them.

Until Will.

“I mean, I guess I loved Brian. Or thought I did,” she whispers, before clearing her throat. She doesn’t know. She was immature, in a lot of ways, when she met Will. “It doesn’t matter. It’s not an excuse. I hurt you, brutally, even if… unintentionally. I thought it was casual, at first. I don’t know. And then I fell in love with you, and I broke it off with Brian, and I never saw him again. And when he moved to New York I… I panicked. And I told you. And I’m sorry. If I could go back and do it over again I wouldn’t, but… I can’t do that.”

If she had the chance to do so many things over. If she had stuck around in New York, if she had fought harder even after she had embedded, if she had just… if she had been more mature about a lot things.

Twenty-six months in warzone taught her a lot.

But not enough.

“And Wade… I… it was petty, and I was jealous, and lonely. And it was a bad decision, and he knew that I was still in lo—that’s why he…”

She cuts herself off, reroutes the message.

“I love you. I know you said it because you were high, Will. And that’s… fine. You’re going to wake up and you’re going to be angry with me again, even if… even if you do really love me, but I can wait. And if you want me to ignore your voicemail… I’m not going to take advantage of your lack of sobriety, or any—”

_You have exceeded the voicemail length. To listen to your message, press three. To record another message, press four._

She briefly deliberates on the idea of leaving another message. Of taking the time to jot down some notes, put together a script of some kind, but then she laughs pitifully at herself at that idea and ends the call, tossing the BlackBerry away from her.

It is what it is.

(God, doesn’t she know _that._ )

She goes to work.

Because she can’t fall back asleep, and because she can’t just sit around her apartment, because he might call. So she gets up and showers. Blows dry her hair. In a daze, her fingers trail along the row of hangers in her walk-in, plucking a blouse from the rack. And then a skirt, and a pair of shoes. Puts on the same make-up she’s worn for years, the same jewelry.

She goes to work.

Because that is how MacKenzie McHale copes.

 

* * *

 

He first distinctly considers the possibility that he’s still high. So he listens to it again. And then again, before it finally begins to settle into his head, clearing out the last foggy wisps of the previous night’s high and seven hours of sleep.

_I never stopped loving you. And I know that you probably don’t believe me, but that’s what I was trying to tell you. In all those emails, all the voicemails._

He’d woken up, immediately recalled several events from the night before, and had wanted to fling himself off his balcony. Unfortunately, he thought derisively, it was a rather large newsday, so that would have to wait. So instead Will laid in bed, staring remorsefully at the ceiling, unwilling to move to check his phone or email or google alerts.

_Do it for me, Will._

And he’d put his hands on her, and not like… but like a fucking idiot. And he’d gone home with _do it for me_ ringing in his ears, and somewhere around three in the morning some sort of lovelorn malaise had taken over him. So he had picked up the phone. And called MacKenzie.

And now he is sober.

He listens to MacKenzie’s voicemail again.

_I mean, I guess I loved Brian. Or thought I did. It doesn’t matter. It’s not an excuse. I hurt you, brutally, even if… unintentionally. I thought it was casual, at first. I don’t know. And then I fell in love with you, and I broke it off with Brian, and I never saw him again._

The last time he heard her voice this small she was leaving him. Explaining that she had gotten a job with CNN, was leaving New York in two weeks, and that she was leaving resumes for possible replacements on his desk, and that again, she was so, so sorry.

She thought it was _casual?_ In what fucking world…

 _I love you. I know you said it because you were high, Will. And that’s… fine. You’re going to wake up and you’re going to be angry with me again, even if… even if you do really love me,_ _but I can wait. And if you want me to ignore your voicemail… I’m not going to take advantage of your lack of sobriety, or any—_

The message cuts off there; he knows that. It has the last four times he’s played it, but still he flinches, expecting it to keep going. For MacKenzie to rush out words that somehow make it easy, make him forgive her.

_You’re going to wake up and you’re going to be angry with me again, even if… even if you do really love me._

Swallowing hard, he realizes that he can’t do that to her. That he _won’t_ do that to her. He was the one to call her last night, he opened the door. And now Mac’s responded.

Will plays it again.

Her voice is strengthened by desperation, and then curtailed at times by meek cautiousness to the point where he can barely hear her at all. Unable to think of her but small, wrapped in her sheets, holding her phone to her ear with two hands, he decides he isn’t angry.

But he also has no idea what to _do._

He looks at the clock, and curses, scrambling out of bed so that he isn’t late to the first rundown.

_Hey, it’s me. I got your voicemail. And I know—I know you said that it wasn’t because you’re high. But I—I know you, Will. And I guess I’m saying if you want an out, just hang up right now._

He hadn’t wanted an out. (Mechanically, he shaves, gets dressed. Legs through pants, arms through sleeves, fingers numbly fastening buttons. Comb through hair. Brush teeth.) He kept listening. That means something, right?

“Fuck,” he mutters, texting Lonny that he’s ready.

She’s right, though.

He did say it because he was high.

_And if you want me to ignore your voicemail… I’m not going to take advantage of your lack of sobriety, or any—_

He said it because he was high, and it doesn’t make it any less true. In a way he wishes it does. He’s smothered his love for MacKenzie with anger, and hatred, and just about any oppressive emotion he could conjure up in the past four years. It only took one night to peel them away, and it’s not like he hasn’t gotten wasted since she’s come home.

_Do it for me, Will._

And doesn’t he.

 _I never stopped loving you_.

Trying not to catch her eye, he sits in his usual place at the head of the table in the conference room. They all already seem to have the rundown well in hand, so he sits back and watches her every time she turns her back, reading anxiety from the way she straightens her spine and curls her shoulders inwards, in how white her knuckles turn while holding the marker to the dry erase board, in the clipped turn in her voice.

In how Jim watches her carefully, pen poised against his paper as if he’s ready to take notes, but his posture is all wrong. Jim doesn’t bother to hide how much he cares about Mac. It makes him the best barometer on how she’s doing.

The kid’s not looking too great.

“We were taking bets on when you were going to show up,” MacKenzie says, back still to him. She sounds off; the staff probably thinks she sounds tired. But he knows that when her voice trills down a half step that she’s tense and exhausted, not wanting from lack of sleep, but from being too anxious to obtain it.

“I was on time,” he answers, looking down at his BlackBerry when she looks back over her shoulder.

“Somehow.” He makes himself look up at her. Crossing her arms under her chest, the look she gives him across the table is one of distinct uncertainty, before a small smirk tugs at the corner of her mouth, and she looks down at the folder of wire reports sitting before Jim. He has no idea what she sees on his face. “But I forgot, you’re a metalogical miracle.”

“Is that what I said?”

He regrets his word choice immediately, when Mac looks at him, expression inscrutable. Licking his lips, he knows that he has to talk to her as soon as this is over. She thinks he’s toying with her, and though he avoids outwardly noticing their demeanors, the senior staff has picked up on the odd tension between them.

Her office.

He’ll follow her to her office after this, and regrets that he didn’t wake up earlier, tries to hold her gaze and make it mean something. And realizes he’s probably failed, when her eyes dart back to the reports that Jim has been feeding her.

“Anyway, as I was saying, we’re leading off with coverage of the crowds that assembled outside the White House before pivoting back to Obama’s statement—”

 

* * *

 

Smoothing all worry from her face, she squashes down the panic bubbling in her stomach while he’s trailing her into her office after the rundown. Mind running through a dozen or so possibilities, she settles on the likelihood that Will wouldn’t come in late to avoid her just to sequester himself in her office with her at his first opportunity.

Regardless, she hugs her folio to her chest, waiting for him to say something.

Instead, he just shifts awkwardly between his feet.

“We need to talk.”

Mac tries to smile and, realizing that she is far too nervous to accomplish one, walks around her desk. “You know,” she begins, tucking her hair behind her hair before spreading her fingers out against her desktop. “The _last_ time one of us said those words, I wound up in another country and you became the Jay Leno of cable news.”

In the blurry top of her vision, she sees him take an unmeasured step towards her.

“I—okay, Mac, don’t look so stricken.” He says nothing after that, and she realizes that he’s waiting for her to make eye contact. Squeezing her fingers together, she does, hemming in rising surge of nerves that she knows must be showing on her face. “It’s not like that,” Will says, as gently as he can.

And then offers no further explanation.

“Okay…?”

His lips quirk into a nervous grin. “No I’m just—I did _try_ to figure out how to say—” For a moment he stalls entirely, and she can see the mental cogs attempting to mash something together. “Okay. I got your voicemail.”

“Oh.”

“I really do—I thought it was a good idea to tell you because I was high.” He shakes his head, berating himself. “You were… right. But I do—I love you. I just—”

“Can’t forgive me,” she finishes for him, quietly, and then remembering her half-garbled attempt at a response, grimaces. Shaking her head, she folds her arms under her chest and dedicates herself to trying again. She does, after all, have nothing left to lose. Except the show, but the way his features soften with self-recrimination makes her think he won’t tug that out from under her. “I did try to explain it… when I first came back. And this morning, I… I wrote to you a lot, when I was gone. What I said was a condensed version of that, I suppose. I probably should have taken the time to do it _coherently—_ ”

“It was fine,” he rushes to say, and then sits in the chair across from her desk. His mouth hangs open slightly, and they wind up staring at each other, unable to figure out how to proceed after years of separation and obfuscation.

Watching hesitance and disquiet build up behind his eyes, Mac realizes that he won’t make the first move sober.  

Swallowing hard and training her eyes to her fingernails, she does. “I was hung up on him because he had rejected me. That’s normal.” Hazarding a look up at him, she sees that Will’s face has shuttered to hide his discomfort, the remaining trace of it persisting in the nervous turn of his mouth, the way he folds his body to seem harmless. Looking down again, she presses forward. “I liked that he hated that I was dating you.”

“We weren’t just dating,” he protests, lifting a hand from where it rests on the arm of the chair.

“Later,” she corrects mildly. “We weren’t just dating later. At the beginning we were, though. And I was using you, to get—you know.” She doesn’t. MacKenzie still isn’t certain what she was doing with Brian, except to bolster her own self esteem by driving him to envy. Turning it over in her head, like she’s done for the past four years, she still can’t decide if she loved Brian, why she was so hung up over him. “I wasn’t a very good person, when you first met me.”

“That’s not true—”

MacKenzie almost laughs at the expression of indignance on his face.

_But I have to tell you… I mean, after tonight, I really wanna tell you…  that I’ve never stopped loving you._

“Yes, it is,” she asserts, laughing then, the sound ringing hollowly with self-deprecation. “You didn’t notice I was seeing my ex-boyfriend behind your back, and you didn’t notice how much of an immature idiot I was. I’m not the same person I was six years ago. Or a few years ago. And neither are you.” That squares between them for a moment, heavy and claustrophobic, like a door shutting on a single exit. Smiling tightly, she continues, finally able to lift her eyes from her desk. “But then… and then I fell in love with you and I never saw him again. And if I hadn’t told you, you’d never have known.”

It’s Will who looks away this time, albeit briefly. “So why did you tell me?”

Her smile falters, and blossoms again, sadder, wiser. “If I had to do it all over again I wouldn’t. But I had never been in a relationship as serious as ours—I wasn’t _lying_ this morning. Or twenty seconds ago. And I’m not—I’m not making excuses for myself, either.”

He hates excuses, and she feels it, physically, when they slip back into old patterns, slide back into guarded expressions and closed body language.

“You’re sure you didn’t tell me because you wanted to break up?” The accusatory sting is dampened, but not gone from his voice, and she knows she was right. Will got so high that he forgot that he was mad at her. And now he is again.

Exhaling softly, she ducks her head, purses her lips.

It was foolish to assume that anything would change.

“I’m,” she starts, as beseeching as she is exasperated. “Have you been listening to me, at all?”


	2. Twisting and Turning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **A/N:** I promise this is the last chapter that will use dialogue from the show. I just honestly think that the hair and makeup fight does it best, and the initial premise of this was "what if they had that fight much, much earlier" and then the question was, "well, what could put them in the same position as Mac goading Will into firing her." And the answer seemed pretty simple--Mac gets the voice mail. She only ever needed an inch to try to break the holding pattern.

Will balks. “It’s a reasonable—”

“Yeah, I’m _sure_.” Her mouth shapes into a reflexive, worried grin. “Are you sure that you’re not just trying to push me away again?”

“When did I push you away?” _She_ was the one who told him about Brian. _She_ was the one who quit the show and left _him_. She was the one who walked into his apartment and said _we need to talk_ , as if those words have ever prefaced anything but a break-up. _I was using you_. She even admits it.  

How in the fuck is he supposed to trust that Mac didn’t just dump him, and regret it once it got rough overseas? Of course your celebrity ex-boyfriend looks good when you’re sleeping in a bunker in the desert. Spend two or three years romanticizing your old life, and you're bound to fall in love with it again, forget that you ever got bored with it in the first place.

And even if MacKenzie does— _truly_ does—love him…

“I went all the way to _Peshawar_ ,” she cries, half-indignant. Forehead creasing, she stares at him for a moment, before shaking her head. “No. Facing the Taliban was easier,” she mutters before shaking her head again, seemingly trying to right herself. Unfolding her arms, she gestures towards him. “Which, fine.” Her eyes flicker back to him, before faltering again. “That was my own decision. But you were the one who told me to get the, and I quote, _the fuck out of New York_ and the fuck out of your life.”

Because she _used him_. Because she used him, and was so fucking distraught when he wanted it over, when he didn’t want to talk to her, when she made it about _her_ instead of what _she_ did. Because she had the gall to beg, and cry, come into his office with wide hazel eyes and then had the gall to abandon him and the show, not stick around and at least do the fucking job and leave him alone besides—if she just wanted to be his coworker. It wasn’t like they had reported their relationship to HR.

She looks at him like she’s expecting him to react in a certain way, and he won’t give her the satisfaction.

“And let me tell you something,” she says, turning his lack of response into an opportunity for self-righteousness. “It’s just… you had a ring, you were prepared to marry me, but you were unwilling to read any of my emails or answer any of my calls from when I was still in Atlanta, or Afghanistan, or Iraq, or Pakistan, getting shot at, getting blown up—”

He stands, shoving his hands into his pockets. Face twisting into a grimace of confusion, she follows him to her feet, and he feels anger rising at her attempt at self-martyrization, like he hasn’t spent the past four years trying to get over what she’s done.

“Yeah, I’m sorry for this, but the ring was a practical joke.” Ignoring how her face blanks, before slowly shifting into an expression of shock, he forces his voice to remain causal, plowing forward with the story. “You were having the staff vet me, Mac.” Did she think he wouldn’t know what they’d find? How she would react? “I knew you were gonna find the offer from when we were together for me to do something on the West Coast. I knew you were gonna come into the office waving it and saying, ‘aha, you were never as serious as you said, ‘cause if you were you’d have told me about a job you were considering on the other side of the country.’ And that’s what happened.”

And she did. She needed to feel like she was less at fault for what happened between them.

Only once he finishes does he notice how her eyes have stopped focusing, glazed over, how her fingers are holding onto the back of her chair to keep her steady. “You know,” she says slowly, “I heard ‘the ring was a practical joke...’ and then I didn’t hear anything after that.”

He scrambles. “It wasn’t a joke. It was a rejoinder. It wasn’t a joke.”

Her eyes refocus, but on a point a few feet in front of her desk. Carefully, she brushes her hair behind her ears, blinking repeatedly until the look of confusion washes from her features. “You took out a ring, and showed it to me as _proof_ that your intention had been to marry me.”

“I bought the ring that morning,” he calmly explains, feeling his confidence begin to be shaken from him when her features tighten with pain. “Scott’s assistant did.”

_I love you. I know you said it because you were high, Will. And that’s… fine. You’re going to wake up and you’re going to be angry with me again, even if… even if you do really love me, but I can wait._

She was right.

And now she looks like she’s barely standing. But Will doesn’t doubt her ability to keep herself upright, no matter what. She’ll be fine. MacKenzie’s always been strong-willed, has always been able to endure.

Has she, though? Is his mind just retrofitting the MacKenzie that she is today over the one he first fell in love with six years ago? Doubt creeps and settles in his stomach. Her words have him reconsidering the early months of their relationship, fast forwarding through memories, looking for skips and deletions and edits.

_I wasn’t a very good person, when you first met me._

That can’t be true.

 _Later. It wasn’t just dating later_.

One of these things has to be false. But he doesn’t like the implications of either.

_Fuck._

Her mouth settles into a grim line, and dread begins to well in his chest. “Your agent’s _assistant_ went to Tiffany’s and bought the ring that morning?”

“Yes. I’m sorry. And you were never supposed to know,” he continues calmly, tamping down on the panic threatening to seep into his voice, clinging to his composure. “So I get the irony, and I am really sorry.”

Mac gives a disbelieving little laugh. “That ring must have cost a quarter of a million dollars.”

“I’m not really sure.”

He is. He knows exactly how much it cost, and she’s not far off, because honestly he told Scott to buy the biggest diamond that Tiffany’s had in the store. And, shit. He can’t fucking tell her that he kept it, because he— _I’ve never stopped loving you_ —but still, if he did that to her and then decided to keep it… Will doesn’t know that that means.

“We returned it that afternoon,” he blurts out. “I asked them to get a nice one—you once described a ring that you saw in a movie.”

 _My Best Friend’s Wedding_. If he recalls correctly.

He stares at MacKenzie, watching her disbelief gather into hurt, and then expand into anger. When her eyes set back onto him, they’re shining and bright.

Her fingers flex, palms facing outwards. “Okay—”

He needs to explain himself.

(Not that he really has any idea how to.

 _I bought the ring because I knew it would hurt you. I didn’t want to give you the upper hand._ )

“Mac—”

Exhaling hard, MacKenzie looks at him. Her lips part slightly, before pursing tightly, and he knows she’s building herself up into something.

“The past _three weeks_ , I have been replaying that _moment_ in your office over, and over again in my mind, how I would have said yes, if you’d asked me four years ago, and how fucking _stupid_ I am and everything I threw away, and it was a _joke_?” she asks, voice rising in pitch, straining not to rise in volume.

Fear and something like shame bore a hole into his chest the moment she stops looking him in the eye, instead directing her gaze and hand gestures to her desk. Swallowing, she spools her control back in until it’s tightly-wound. Visibly restraining herself, forcing herself to remain even, she bites her lip, and then continues.

“I spent twenty-six months in a warzone, came home, signed the most humiliating contract in broadcast news, a _three year contract_ , have taken _every single one_ of your punishments for what I did to you without complaint, and you decide that I don’t feel _guilty enough_ for what I’ve done to you? That I don’t fully understand the ramifications?” She wavers, pushing down her emotions again. “You don’t know—”

Abruptly, she stops. Will scrutinizes her face, trying to get any sort of read on her features.

_Afghanistan, or Iraq, or Pakistan, getting shot at, getting blown up—_

“Don’t know what?” he asks, voice edging on demanding.

Will knows that she got hurt, that she got caught in riots, reported on IED explosions and shootouts in the Khyber mountains.

And he hasn’t asked her. About any of it. Because if he does, and she tells him about these things, about the three missing years, about why Jim follows her doggedly and why her left leg turns in now (he’s angry that he even noticed that) when she walks or why she leans on tables, more commanding than she used to—

He’d forgive her.

If he asked, if he read her emails.

(Because he forgave his dad, more than once. Because his mom did, too. Because they trusted his apologies, his guilt.

Will does not give sympathy to those who have hurt him.)

“Mac, don’t know _what_?”

“Get out,” she says, the muscles of her cheeks and jaw twitching.

“What?”

MacKenzie sighs, regrouping. When she looks up, her eyes are vulnerable, but somehow hard. “I love you, Will. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t. But we’re not doing this now. We’ll talk about this later, because I need to be able to be in your ear tonight. So you’re going to leave, and we’ll finish this after the broadcast.”

He tries one more time.

“I wasn’t—you weren’t ever supposed to even know, and—”

“You just told me!” Mac cries, slamming her hand down on her desk, before recoiling, curling in on herself, shaping herself into something softer. “Just get out, Will.”

Gaping at her for a moment, his mind runs through a dozen different things he could say to her, and finds them all wanting.

So he does as she’s asked.

 

* * *

 

Jim finds her, not even five minutes later.

She used to be better at this, shoving the pain down, had to do it for three years because being embedded means having no privacy, and as one of a handful of women on a marine base she had to learn how to chin up and carry on, but Jim walks in on her sitting at her desk with tears running down her face anyway.

“Mac?”

Waving a hand towards him, she dries her eyes with the other. “I’m fine.”

She realizes he was probably waiting for Will to leave. Jim closes the door to her office, and then shutters the blinds.

“I’m pretty sure you’re not.” Hands on his hips, he stands before her, working his jaw. “What did he do?”

“Nothing.”

Jim looks down at his feet, before raising his eyes back to hers. Uncomfortable, he affords her the meager privacy to at least _try_ to wrest her composure back into place. Sighing shakily, Mac reaches for the tissue box next to her computer, pulling out a few and setting to cleaning up her face, blotting off ruined makeup.

“What did he say to you?” he asks, quietly calm, voice threaded through by an unsettling intensity.

“It’s nothing,” she breathes, trying to keep her tone casual. Regardless, she knows that she sounds strangled. No that Jim would believe her anyway. “Don’t worry about it.”

Shifting his weight, he widens his stance, letting concern bleed through on his features. “Mac, it’s clearly not nothing. This is twice in the past month I’ve found you like this after he’s spoken to you.”

(After Will showed her the ring in his office three weeks ago, she fled to her office, shut the door. And when she didn’t return to the conference room to hear the rest of the opposition research, Jim had come to find her.

Curious, really, more than concerned.

And found her crying in her bathroom. Or trying very hard not to—MacKenzie can’t quite remember if she started crying before or after she had Jim’s shoulder to do it on.

Then, as usual, _it’s nothing that I don’t deserve_. _It’s between Will and me. Don’t get mixed up in it._ )

How the fuck did the day start out with _I’ve never stopped loving you_ and now, barely six hours later, empty out to _the ring was a practical joke?_ She knew, though, didn’t she? That he’d be angry, once he sobered up.

She should have braced for it.

“It’s my own fault.”

Is it?

Jim must see the growing uncertainty on her face. “Really, Mac? Four years later, it’s still all your fault?”

Her head is spinning. Will thinks that she told him about Brian to break up with him. Will thinks that she left to get away from him. That she came back to _News Night_ for—what? What could he possibly think? She signed a contract that lets him fire her at the end of every week, stood by as he paraded date after date in front of her, landed himself in the tabloids. Has worked for more than a _year_ to get his trust back.

She knew it was never going to be simple, or easy. And she was going to wait, for however long it took for him to come back.

_You were spectacular tonight._

She should have just ignored the voicemail. And then no, she thinks. That would have just made it worse, because _if the answer is no then just do me a favor and don’t call me back or bring it up_ and just…

_Fuck._

Why the _fuck_.

“Mac?” Jim takes a step closer, and she waves him off again before wrapping her arms around her middle. “Are you gonna be okay to work today?”

“I’m fine,” she manages to offer, only half-present. The rest of her head is trying to collate her emotions, unknot anger from betrayal from guilt from self-recrimination from self-righteousness. “You know I’ve worked through worse.”

MacKenzie wonders if this means that Will has never intended to get back together with her.

_Yes. I’m sorry. And you were never supposed to know. So I get the irony, and I am really sorry._

What she thinks hurts the most is that, yes—she knows what he makes now, knows that it’s more than several million a year, and that $250,000 is a hit but he can take it, but four years ago? He didn’t make a fraction of he does now. She’s spent the past three weeks figuring out how much of his old salary it would have been, what would have been rearranged for her to have a ring like that, something that showy and ostentatious, because he would have been _proud_ to have her as his wife, and she would have be so goddamn proud to wear his ring and now—

It was a joke. It was showy and ostentatious because Will wanted to make a statement. He wanted a prop. He wanted it to hurt.

And it does.

Somehow she’s gone from sitting behind her desk to muffling herself against Jim’s shoulder, his arms awkwardly hooked under her own.

“I could put a thumb tack on his chair,” he suggests, trying to pry a laugh from her. “I’m totally serious. Thumb tack. Maybe even a staple, ‘cause those are harder to see.”

“ _Jim_ ,” she says, chiding him.

“I’m just saying.”

She huffs a watery laugh. “I’ll string you up. I don’t want to be protected. I don’t _need_ to be protected.”

“Did I say that?” he asks, pretending to be affronted. “I’ve seen you take down seven foot marines. You’ve kicked my ass.”

“Yeah, that wasn’t especially difficult,” she muses, and thinks that they’re both going to not notice the wet spot she’s left on his shirt.

They smile at each other, his more sure than hers, both remembering being taught to spar by the Unit Commander of the 7th Marine Regiment, because they needed to learn to protect themselves and each other, because they might need to disarm someone, because they might need to fight their way out.

(Or fight their way in.

She remembers him mouth shouting silent words, his face hovering above her while she struggled to stay awake.)

Jim’s expression changes from amused to conciliatory, and Mac lets her arms drop from around his middle. Stepping away, he shrugs, shoving his hands into his pockets. “Yeah… anyway, I’m saying. I know you can be your own knight in shining… whatever. I’m just offering.”

She cocks her head, wiping away one last tear with an index finger. “Thumb tack?”

Of all the things…

Jim barks a small laugh. “It was the first thing that came to mind, all right?” Again, he pulls himself back, but not before reaching out with one hand to momentarily grasp her bicep. “You sure you’re okay?”

“I’m okay.” She smiles tightly, and nods, eyes widening.

Jim snorts, rounding out back in front of her desk. “He could probably take me anyway.”

“Probably?” She lifts an eyebrow. Will played high school football. Jim was the captain of the debate team and played the clarinet in the marching band.

Again, he pretends to be offended for her benefit, hesitating at the closed door before opening it. “Don’t rub it in.”

 

* * *

 

He should have just told her that he kept it, but that would be worse in a way. _I bought the ring to hurt you, but kept it in case I ever figure out how to forgive you so I can propose with it._ So no, he can’t tell MacKenzie that. He needs to figure out what the hell he _is_ going to tell her, though, when they finish this after broadcast, because he never wants to see that look on her face ever again.

Why in the fuck did he even—

_Getting shot at, getting blown up--_

She got hurt. Because he told her to get the fuck out of New York, and in true MacKenzie fashion, she hit the ground running. Out of New York, out of the country, away from every broadcasting hub where he might run across her, and into a warzone.

He had to remind her that she hurt him first, but that he got the last word.

_I wasn’t a very good person, when you first met me._

He wasn’t that great, either, when she came back from being embedded. And she loved him anyway.

But that was her fault. She was the one who went away.

Scrubbing his hands over his face, he almost laughs at the ridiculous hypocrisy of that statement.

Mac’s taken the blame for all of her actions and mistakes, and what he knows of Brian Brenner, he probably didn’t help her be the beacon of good ethics or stern and empathetic boss that she is for their staff.

_And I’m not—I’m not making excuses for myself._

No. Okay. He can’t either.

 _Later. It wasn’t just dating later_.

Just… fuck.

He startles when Jim raps his knuckles against the outside wall, and then enters his office without waiting for an invitation.

“What’s up?” Will asks, leaning back in his desk chair.

Biting his upper lip, Jim walks slowly into the center of the room, looking like he’s thinking something over. Inclining his head forward, he looks Will square in the eye, before saying quietly, but fiercely, “I don’t know what you said to her, and honestly I don’t care. I won’t quit, because she needs me here, but make her cry again and I will make your life hell in every single way I possibly can that doesn’t compromise the show. She made me promise not to do anything in response to the shit you give her, and I haven’t until now because I respect Mac too much.”

Staring intently, Jim tilts his head forward, thinking, considering. Pursing his lips, it looks like he’s extracting the words from his mind with care, still debating whether or not to share them as he speaks them. “It was gonna be a rough day for her, besides whatever stunt you just pulled. We spent three years getting shot at by insurgents working on Osama bin Laden’s orders.”

 _Getting shot at, getting blown up._ Will makes himself nod to Jim, who takes a deep breath, nostrils flaring.

Somehow, all Will can think of is how he called Jim _Scooter_ the first day they met, and how angry Jim looks now, angry and older, even if his shirt is still rumpled, shirt wrinkled and tie crooked, hair desperately needing to be combed.

All Will can _feel_ is a nebulous wave of terror washing over him, again and again.

“I was there for her when you weren’t,” Jim quietly seethes. “Remember _that_.”

As quickly as he came in, Jim leaves without so much as a backwards glance.

Reaching shakily for the cigarettes at the top of his desk, Will decides that he’s definitely going to go to his appointment with Habib this week.  


	3. Center Face

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **A/N:** _Well, This Was Longer Than Intended: A Memoir._ Or, alternatively, this is what happens when I write pages of dialogue to narrate later, I always wind up underestimating how much narration I'm going to need. Either way... it got long, story of my life. 
> 
> This is the last update I'll be able to do until finals are over. My last term paper is due May 2nd, although I do plan (ha) on finishing it before then, if all goes according to schedule and my motivation doesn't fall out from under me entirely. If all _does_ go well, Chapter Four should be up May 3rd or 4th, depending on how tired I am and how long it takes me to move home. (Virginia to New Jersey is a lovely eight hour backcountry drive.) So I've tried to not leave you on a cliffhanger.

“Why do you think she went, then?” Habib asks, leaning forward in his chair, lacing his fingers together.

Will snorts, crossing his arms.  “I don’t know, I thought it was to make herself the victim.” Habib scowls, leaning back again. Will scoffs, and then shrugs. “Make herself sympathetic, so she could come back to New York, and shove it in my face that I was the bad guy, I was the one who made her go into a warzone, that she was the poor traumatized one.”

Habib nods. “Has she?”

“Has she what?”

He sighs. “Shoved it in your face?” Reaching for his notes, he flips through them until finding the detail that he wants. “She did spend twenty-six months there. Something must have happened.”

Will falters. “No she—she hasn’t.”

“How often does MacKenzie talk about her time overseas?” Habib asks.

Quickly, his mind runs through a year of stories on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military presence in Pakistan, of Mac folding her arms and concaving her body, providing factuals and counterfactuals, but nothing of her own experiences beyond general knowledge, her eyes flickering to the clock labeled “Islamabad” in the bullpen. “She doesn’t.”

Habib lifts his eyebrows, seemingly curious. “Not at all?”

Will opens and closes his mouth around a few potential answers, half of them flippant or irreverent. _Why should I care?_

“Jim does. Sometimes.” Jim definitely does talk about it, offering quips about standing by and sleeping in ditches and palling around with marines. Occasionally the quips even make Mac smile. Archly, of course, aloof. Offering nothing in return but her amusement at the shared memory. “I mean—maybe that’s why she went over there. And then decided against using it against me. Because she…”

“Because MacKenzie has never stopped loving you,” Habib finishes when Will stalls out.

Scowling, Will brushes off the notion with a vaguely hostile hand gesture. “I don’t know if she never stopped.”

“But that’s what she _said_ ,” Habib reiterates, referring to the half-asleep, rambling message that still sits on Will’s voicemail.

“Yeah.”

So? MacKenzie has _said_ a lot of things without meaning them, trying to cover up for her own recklessness.

“You don’t trust her?” The therapist’s face crinkles in consternation, but his voice remains even.

He hesitates, biting down on his words, on the inclination to say yes. Because he knows that he shouldn’t trust Mac as much as he does, that he’s just asking for more pain if he forgives her, moves on with her. “I… trust her with the show.”

Habib nods, and Will rolls his eyes in anticipation of some sort of wise remark about what Mac does or doesn’t deserve. “But you don’t trust her when she says that she didn’t tell you about Brian to break up with you?”

(There it is.)

“I _trust_ that I backed her into a corner by calling her while I was high and telling her to respond or I’d assume she feels nothing, and so she had to come up with something,” Will answers, plotting his points with flips and waves of straightened fingers.

Like he hasn’t already worked this through? He wishes desperately that he could trust Mac, forgive her. It’d be easier than living like this, completely in love with her and completely unable to move on from her and completely consumed by the image of her and Brian.

Although now he can’t tell if he’s so pissed because she was able to call it before it happened— _you’re going to wake up and you’re going to be angry with me again, even if… even if you do really love me, but I can wait._

MacKenzie is waiting, and he’s idiot for the ring.

Habib steeples his fingers under his chin. “Okay, let’s just take for granted, for a moment, that MacKenzie is telling the truth.”

“Why?”

“You’re a pain,” the therapist grouses. “Just do it.”

“That’s not a very smart thing for a psychiatrist to say,” he snarks.

“You’re a special case,” Habib replies, mostly irreverent, before his face clouds with an expression much more serious. “If she told you, like she said, because she thought that’s what she should do now that the two of you were in a very serious, very committed relationship, then why do you think she decided to embed?”

“To run away from what she did,” Will answers automatically.

Habib purses his lips. “My notes say you told her to get out of New York.”

“I… yes.” He did say that to her. Out of anger, when she kept insisting that Brian meant nothing to her anymore, when she asked why he wouldn’t talk to her. And the next day he’d heard that she’d tendered her resignation and was meeting with headhunters from CNN Atlanta who were interested in her previous embed experience, her contacts in the international sphere.

 _Get the fuck out of New York_ , is what he said, specifically, looking at the cigarette in his hand instead of her face, as carelessly as he could muster. If he didn’t care about MacKenzie, then it wouldn’t hurt.

But he cares about MacKenzie.

Otherwise he wouldn’t be seeing the look on her face when he told her that the ring was a practical joke—no, a rejoinder—again and again during the quiet moments of the day.

“So I’m going to guess that it was more than running away, although it’s very possible that running away was one of her motives,” Habib hazards, before pausing thoughtfully. “During the fight in her office, you said she rattled off a list of punishments she’s taken—her contract, the dates coming by the newsroom, et cetera, and on that list she put ‘twenty-six months in a warzone.’”

“So?”

Habib scoffs. “Will, you’re not this unfathomably stupid.”

“I didn’t send her to a warzone as punishment,” Will balks.

“Honestly?” Habib says, cocking his head.

“I didn’t,” Will protests. Habib physically restrains himself from rolling his eyes, and he flinches towards him.

The therapist inhales and exhales slowly, sifting through his notes. “Yeah, that’s not what I was—have you considered the possibility that _MacKenzie_ sent _herself_ to a warzone to punish herself?”

“I… why?” _Irreverent to consequences_ is one of Mac’s biggest character traits. Even if he accepts that Mac left New York because he asked her to, it doesn’t make sense that she’d embed just to punish herself. Before coming back to New York, she’d never signed a contract for longer than twenty-four months, preferring to be mobile, fluttering between New York and DC and Atlanta and abroad.

Will has no doubts that she’d sign on for three years at CNN without casting second thought at what could happen to her in the Green Zone, or Peshawar, or wherever.

Habib leans forward, clasping his hands together. “Because, again, if we trust her—because she never stopped loving you.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“Why not?”

Will flounders.

“Because it doesn’t.” Scrubbing his hands over his face, he gives up on appearing nonchalant and disaffected, leaning forward so he can rest his elbows on his knees, remembering his conversation with MacKenzie Monday night, after the show. It had been, like the life of man, nasty, brutish, and short. But for what the conversation wasn’t, compounded with his… non-talk with Jim, reminded him of what Charlie told him when trying to get Mac to stay on a year ago. “When she first came back, Charlie said she was ‘physically and mentally exhausted.’ Been to too many funerals, hadn’t sleep for more than four hours at a time in three years. I asked her about it, and she said she’s been exhausted since she was thirty.”

Habib gives a short little laugh. “You know, considering you don’t trust a word that comes out of her mouth—”

“That’s not what I said,” Will protests, looking up.

“It’s pretty much what you said,” he says, inclining his head towards Will. “Do you think Charlie was lying? And what about the other one, the kid—”

“Jim. He’s not—he’s not a kid.” The words are out of his mouth before he realizes it.

Habib’s face softens. “What?”

“What?”

He shrugs. “You look… overwhelmed.”

Will scoffs, hardening his features. “I’m not—after the fight, Jim must have found her. I didn’t know he could get that… angry. But he said—he said _I was there for her when you weren’t._ And something about how it was going to be a rough day for her, because of what it was going to bring up. Bin Laden’s death, I mean.”

“So?”

“I don’t know what that means,” he grumbles.

“I think you do.” When Will says nothing, Habib sighs. “It means that she’s lying to you. Because—”

“You really think she’s punishing herself?” It still doesn’t make sense to him. “But she wants—she wants my sympathy.”

Pursing his lips, Will can tell that Habib is choosing his next words carefully, forces himself to stay quiet.

“I think, and again, I’ve never met her, but considering the filing cabinet taking up space in my office, I think that MacKenzie believed, up until you told her about the ring being a joke—which, by the way, _I told you so_ —that she deserved absolutely nothing from you but punishment,” he says, voice measured and clinical. “I think that she came back from being embedded with some sort of post-traumatic stress, and she lied to you about it, and that she did this on the same day she signed her contract.”

“So?”

He’s not making the connection, deliberately trying to avoid finding the depth of what _post-traumatic stress_ means, and _deserved absolutely nothing from you but punishment_ , because Will’s slowly realizing exactly how much he agreed with that statement until he actually said the words _the ring was a practical joke_ out loud. He’s spent the past two days terrified, and holding it in.

Because what if he’s missed Mac struggling? What if he’s resented her so much he’s willfully overlooked something? Hell, he’s let _she’s mentally and physically exhausted_ slip from his mind for over a year.

No, that’s not his fault. Mac said she was fine, and he asked her directly.

But what if…

“She was denied employment from every major news station except yours. Charlie knew what happened to her. Why wouldn’t other news division presidents?” Habib asks, laying out his points in a way that hints that he reached this conclusion long ago. “Will, one of the hallmarks of PTSD is feeling a pervading sense of guilt, and shame.”

Terror rises up again. If nothing else (and there is a lot else, he concedes dimly) he prides himself on knowing Mac better than anyone else. “Are you saying she thought I would fire her if I knew she was—she knows I would never—”

“Does she?” he asks quietly, calmly, and in a way that thoroughly pisses Will off.

“I love her.”

“Up until three days ago she didn’t know that,” Habib continues.

Will recoils. “Even if I didn’t—”

Habib doesn’t let Will bowl him over. “You made her sign the most humiliating contract since, and I quote, ‘Antonio made a deal with Shylock.’ You put her in her place, Will. She went willingly, but you were the one who told her she’d have to pay her pound of flesh.” Not finished, he makes sure what he just said sinks in before adding on one last thing. “And I suspect that Charlie told you because he knew it would curry sympathy with you, considering your past.”

_Oh._

“Mac acts like she’s fine,” he protests. But he doesn’t even believe it himself, feels that assertion crumbling out from under him before he even finishes saying it.

Habib gives him a small smile. “So do you.”

Which is how Will finds himself with his finger hesitating over the doorbell next to MacKenzie’s front door that Saturday at eleven in the morning, flowers in hand. (She hasn’t moved, just rented her apartment while she was away. Probably because it was easier, quicker to do that than try to list it. Will’s wondered if that means that she’s always intended to come back.

Still, it’s uneasy, in a way. He hasn’t been here in years. Remembers where it is, of course, on the twelfth floor of a midtown high-rise with a solid view of Times Square. Mac’s never liked the quiet or the dark, but then again, neither has he.)

12E. He’d double-checked on the ground floor, at the mailboxes (Mac’s never liked living in buildings with doormen), to make sure. His finger rests on the doorbell, and sighing, he forces himself to press it.

“I woke you up,” he comments when MacKenzie opens the door looking bedraggled, hair piled on top of her head, clothes askew.

(Beautiful.)

She shrugs, opening her door further to let him in. “I didn’t fall asleep until late.”

“How late is late?” he asks, handing her the bouquet of lilies, roses, and gerbera daisies.

Smiling in a vaguely sleepy fashion, she turns away from him to walk to her kitchen (she hasn’t moved where she keeps her small collection of vases), leaving him to shut the door behind him.

“I’ve missed how your apologies always seem to come with some overpriced token of affection,” she teases, and he immediately feels relieved. She’s been coldly tense towards him all week, deservedly so, but Will hasn’t wanted to drag out their personal issues at work again so he’s let it go.

Although yesterday they had seemed to be settling into something like normal, even if his brain has been running on loop about Mac embedding to punish herself since Wednesday morning, and then kicking back _don’t ask her here, you idiot_ in response.

He doesn’t want to hurt her more.

And he’d tell her she’s wrong about the flowers being overpriced, but the roses _are_ out of season. So instead he lets his eyes linger on the backs of her legs, and how good they look in her incredibly short, incredibly tight shorts.

After pausing thoughtfully, Mac continues. “Seven? I was stuck on something one of our military sources gave us.”

“Stuck on what?” Will asks, shoving his hands in his pockets and following her out of the entryway and into her living room, stopping in the alcove that holds a server and a small dining room table. “And that’s not late, that’s early.”

“Do you want coffee?” she asks, yanking the pot from the machine and filling it at the sink after depositing the flowers into a fluted vase.

“Sure.”

“You can sit, you know,” she says, looking back over her shoulder, over the half wall that meets her kitchen and the dining area. “I’m not tossing you out, if you couldn’t tell from the fact that I offered you coffee.”

“Coffee takes ten minutes, it’s not much of a commitment,” he muses, looking around her apartment. Not much has changed, he thinks, trying to not dredge of the memory of the last time he was here, carrying Mac with her legs wrapped around his waist to her bedroom.

Same earthy, muted tones and dark woods, leather (one of the few things they’ve ever been able to unilaterally agree on is preferences in home decor, although her place has softer edges, personable clutter, framed pictures), plush rugs over hardwood floors, bookshelves filled to the brim. Throws on the couch, because she gets cold too easily, one TV in the living room but he knows there are probably two or three in her bedroom. An office she will typically forsake for her bed, which will end up half covered in legal pads and production notes before she finally falls asleep.

MacKenzie laughs. “Well, you bought my good will with the flowers.”

“Exactly what they were supposed to do,” he replies, somehow finding himself smiling, albeit at the floor. He can hear the clink of mugs being lifted down from the shelf and onto the counter, the fridge opening and closing.

“That, and the purely pathetic look in your eyes,” she continues on, as if he hasn’t said anything.

“Hey!”

“And my own sleep-deprivation,” she rambles, mostly to herself at this point. Rolling his eyes, Will shrugs off his jacket and tosses it on top of the table, rounding the back to her couch.

“You and sleep-deprived have _never_ equated to good will towards anyone.” He startles when she walks out from the kitchen, revealing her thighs which are now directly in his eye line. “I—what’s that?”

Barely missing a step, Mac looks down between the mugs in her hands, biting her lip. “Um… just outside Baghdad. 2008. Shrapnel.”

“How did I not know about that?” he asks softly, eyes focused squarely on the long red line puckering the middle of her left thigh, the dotted dime-sized scars speckling the flesh around it.

“Well, I don’t exactly walk around the office in spandex,” Mac explains tamely. “There wasn’t a wire report.” Biting her lip, she looks down again, shaking her head as if to clear it. “I mean, not that you…”

“I would have noticed if a report came down the wire that said that you were injured,” he tells her lowly.

“Oh.”

Will can tell that’s not what she expected him to say, stiffly holding out his coffee for him to take. He does, and immediately places it on the low table in front of her couch, before reaching in front of him to lightly grasp her hips, guiding her to stand in front of him.

 _I think that she came back from being embedded with some sort of post-traumatic stress, and she lied to you about it_ , Habib had told him.

 _I love you_ , Will almost says. Certainly thinks it, without nearly as much pain as he’s felt in years. Almost runs his index finger down the length of the scar, the indentation of it in her leg, the bump where he can see the skin healed over itself. Almost, and doesn’t, because he doesn’t know if she wants him to touch her.

But she hands him her cup of coffee to place on the table, so he thinks that she might.

“What happened?” he asks, after clearing his throat. She shifts within his grasp, but makes no move to escape it, instead dropping a hand to rest over his, swallowing hard.

“Routine patrol, IED,” she starts, softly. Her fingers squeeze around his. “Didn’t get cover quickly enough. Got under some cover, otherwise my calf would be—I’d probably be missing from my knee down. Jim got nicked in his lower back, couldn’t walk for a few days after. I mean… neither could I.”

She looks down at him, and he can tell her smile is somewhat forced. It hits him, nothing like a physical blow, but with a creeping fear that snakes into his muscles, hooking in and pulling—MacKenzie almost lost a leg. MacKenzie almost lost a lot more than that.

_Facing the Taliban was easier._

When he slides the hand not covered by hers down to trace the contours of scar with his thumb, feeling the hard, recessed flesh under the pad of his finger, she continues.

“The medic only had time to get the shrapnel out and staple my thigh back together and then when we got back to base obviously had… bigger things to handle.”

_I was there for her when you weren’t. Remember that._

She shivers, he thinks, or it’s just his imagination. When he looks up at her to gauge how she’s doing, she splits her face into another pasted-on grin, before using the excuse of tugging her hair out its bun to look away.

“What else… was there anything else that didn’t make it into a wire report?”

 

* * *

 

Mac considers not showing him, but if they’re going to fix this--and Will showing up at her apartment on a Saturday morning with flowers days after starting to apologize definitely seems like they’re fixing it—she has to. Because he’s going to see it eventually.

Hopefully.

And even if not, she should put herself out there to Will.

“Um…”

Hesitating slightly, she curls her fingers into the hem of her tee shirt before lifting it six or so inches, revealing the jagged eight-inch scar that she knows curves up and across the right side of her abdomen.

"Stabbing. Islamabad. Late 2009."

Will makes a distressed little noise, something low and breathy; when his fingers lock up around her hips she bites down on her bottom lip, takes one of his hands and places it on top of the scar.

“It almost got me airlifted to Landstuhl, but I managed to convince my dad to call off the helos. I’m not quite sure how we managed to keep it quiet… my dad, probably,” she explains quietly, smiling nervously, trying to keep her voice unemotional for his sake. She almost regrets telling him that she could have lost part of her leg. “And Jim was pretty forceful. I was laid up in our hotel room in the Islamabad capital district for weeks, going out of my mind with boredom. I’d never filed so many stories. Although I think Jim kept a lot of them from going down the wire, because I was so stoned…”

She’s never done well on Vicodin.

And she should want to hurt him, she knows. For the ring, that is, but she’s never been particularly good at holding a grudge. Especially against Will. She knows why she can forgive him so easily, when he can’t forgive her. And it’s okay. He has baggage that she’ll never come close to understanding. She can wait.

Because now she knows what it’s like to carry around baggage herself. She wants to tell him. _I came home with PTSD. No one would hire me, except Charlie. Because he was an embed once, and a marine, and he trusted that you would take me. Because we both needed each other._

“What happened?” Will asks, voice rough, eyes concentrated on the scar.

“Religious protest in one of the Shiite neighborhoods. US military contractors, armed guards, got involved, and it turned into a riot. I don’t really—I don’t really remember what happened.” She… does. Some. But it’s garbled and distorted, and Mac can never tell if it’s real or something her mind has come up with to fill in the blanks and her nightmares. “You’d have to ask Jim. One minute we were trying to get out of it, the next I was on the ground looking up at Jim. It was deeper than we thought, since it’s… since it’s so long. Jim got me back to the military complex and they sent us to one of the private hospitals and by then I was…”

Her voice drifts off. She remembers hearing about Jim and a couple other of the guys having to donate blood to keep up with her.

“Was what?” Subconsciously, she thinks, he pulls her closer, until her toes are pressed against the base of the couch.

“I wound up losing a couple of feet of small intestine,” she explains, as lightly as she can.

The look on his face is distinctly alarmed. “Mac?”

She tries to brush it off. “They stabilized me pretty quickly. I wasn’t even under all that long.”

“Mac,” he protests, looking up at her. And then must realize how hard his fingers are digging into her hip, because suddenly his grip on her loosens, and something like shame flashes across his features.

“I almost died. A little. It wasn’t that close,” she assures him, laughing a bit even if she doesn’t quite feel it. “By the time a CNN internal affairs person came around I was mostly fine.”

When she realizes Will doesn’t quite know how to touch her, or if he should, she sighs and carefully sinks into his lap. Curling against him, she wraps her arms around his neck, tucking her head under his chin. Tentatively, and then all at once, his arms come around her. MacKenzie turns in more against him, bringing her knees up from where they’re strewn across his legs, worming her way into his side until her lips rest against the collar of his tee shirt.

“How in the hell did you keep it off the wire?” he asks quietly, bringing up a hand to gently comb his fingers through his hair.

“Lucky, I guess,” she says with a shrug. “Had a good team.”  

“Does it hurt?” His other hand trails from her waist to her knee and back, like he can’t get enough of her skin under his own.

Wrapping her fingers around his, she slides his hand back down to the shrapnel wound on her thigh. “I have adhesions. Sometimes they pull. But that’s more uncomfortable than anything else, anymore." Except when she's on her period, but that's not quite a conversation she wants to be having with Will at the moment. "But yes, sometimes. I mean, my thigh hurts before the adhesions do.” For one, she rested after the stabbing like she was supposed to, if only because Jim would not let her get out of bed.

“Why haven’t I noticed?” he asks, fingers connecting the dots between the smaller scars on her leg, almost like he’s learning them, shaping them into constellations to remember.

“To be fair, I didn’t exactly _want_ you to.” Because she just figured that he’d tell her she deserved it, which she already knew, already believed. And on the off-chance that he didn’t it might have been too much for her to handle, at the time. So much of the way she’s defined herself these past few years has been on her own guilt.

His hand slides up under her shirt, not seeking out the stab wound; Mac thinks he might just want to touch more of her, a sentiment she understands. Her own arms are wound around his neck, her face is almost pressed into his shirt—he smells like soap, and aftershave, and laundry detergent, feels warm and solid under her, shirt soft and overwashed.

He turns his head slightly, winds up pressing his jaw into her forehead. “When you first came back… Charlie told me you were mentally and physically exhausted—”

Mac sighs, closing her eyes.

She remembers. How couldn’t she? He’d been so sweet, let them slip back into old roles for a moment, inhabit spaces she’d missed so desperately for years, trying to claw her way back into feeling normal, feeling real.

“And you asked me about it,” she finishes.

“Did you—were you telling me the truth or were you deflecting?”

“I was deflecting.” Will tenses under her. “I mean, and it wasn’t that—I mean I could barely talk about it to anyone but my psychiatrist and Jim and Charlie for a long, long time.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, lifting his hand off her waist to rub his forehead.

Mac knits her eyebrows together. “Why?”

The hand flings out from his forehead to the air in front of them in a gesture of pure frustration. “Because I put you in a position where you felt like you had to lie to me. Charlie _told me_ —”

“Will, I—”

He won’t let her interrupt him. “MacKenzie, he told me you were struggling. It’s not okay that I—”

“And I could have not lied to you about it,” she says, pushing back to look him in the face, voice rising, more certain.

“So we’re both at fault?”

“Yes,” she assures him, resisting the urge to roll her eyes. And then, eyes fixated on his collar, “Regardless, I forgive you. I was the one who sent myself over there, because I—”

“You didn’t have to punish yourself, after,” he tells her, voice nearing gentle, but still deliberate, unyielding in a way, and she wonders when he came to this conclusion. Probably when she was trying to not yell at him this week, she figures. She’d forgiven him by Thursday, but still. “After you told me about Brian. What you did, and I know I’m assuming a lot here, but what you did didn’t merit sending yourself into a warzone. Unless, I don’t know you went, I mean—"

She shakes her head, fanning her hands on over his chest. “My head was a mess. I would have wound up finding some way to punish myself.”

That much is true. And she’s been trying to work on her tendencies to self-punish, to use her guilt as a crutch, but it’s true. Four years ago, she would have found a way, even if the opportunity to embed hadn’t presented herself. And maybe her guilt was selfish, and shows how stupidly self-absorbed she used to be, but it’s what she felt and it’s what she did.

“I don’t want you to punish yourself.” Eyes widening, she looks up at him, biting her lip when he begins to stammer. “I know I can’t—I can’t forgive you yet, and I’m sorry, I’m just—”

“It’s okay, Will.”

“What?” He seems genuinely surprised.

Mac shrugs, looking at her hands. She’s already been over this several times in her head since he told her the ring was a joke, rejoinder, whatever. “I mean, I know why you can’t. I love you. And like I said, in the voicemail… I can wait.”

“Really?”

She laughs, realizing its rung through with a bit of self-deprecation. But it’s honest. “I mean, I’m assuming somewhere around year six or seven I’ll probably start to get a _little_ impatient, but I’m not leaving again. I mean, I can’t, anyway. I signed a three-year contract.”

And then she remembers the other thing, working her jaw when she remembers the non-compete clause, the three million dollars, the very tangible reminder of how angry Will can be at her. The hand in her hair slides down to the nape of her neck, and then comes around to cup her jaw. Reminding herself not to flinch (this is good, it’s overwhelming, but it’s good) she plows forward.

“Unless—I mean, if you fire me, and if you want me to go I will—”

And then she stops talking, because Will’s mouth is covering hers, his thumb stroking the line of her jaw. It’s quick and it’s soft, chaste almost, lasting only a few seconds. He lingers for a moment though, after pulling back, keeping only inches between their lips. And then sighs in a way that sounds both satisfied and frustrated, sitting back.

Surprised and mildly overwhelmed, all MacKenzie can do is blink at him, lips parted.

“I’m not going to fire you,” he tells her intently, both hands framing her face for a few seconds before drifting down to her shoulders, and then more hesitantly, her waist. “And I’m, you know, sorry about that, too.” He deliberates on something for a moment, before leaning in again, kissing her gently on the cheek. “I love you.”

She laughs, a breathy little sound that she almost doesn’t believe. “I know, I have proof.”

“Shut up,” he grouses, but almost seems relieved to fall out of the moment with her.

MacKenzie snorts. “Are you hungry?”

They wind up ordering in, squabbling over who pays—Mac insisting it’s her apartment, Will countering that he’s the one who showed up uninvited, Mac saying she doesn’t care, Will winning because he carries the Bank of Vienna around in his wallet—before settling onto the couch to eat Chinese out of takeout boxes while watching the weekend shows.

At some point Mac goes back to her bedroom and hauls out her notes (including a list that at 4 AM she apparently titled _Will Looks Good With His Hair Pushed Back and Other Things to Make Him Keep Doing On Air_ that hastily gets folded and shoved into the back of a notebook) to berate him with, and they wind up plotting out half of Monday’s show without realizing it.

And then it starts to pour, so when the news shows change to cheesy cult movies that they both not-so-secretly like, Mac winds up pushing Will down onto the cushions so she can use him as a pillow. He protests in a token way, letting her stretch out on top of him before reaching up and grabbing one of her throws off the back of the couch, tossing it to cover her.

When she realizes that she’s falling asleep sometime around three, she tries to sit up—

“I don’t want to trap you,” she murmurs sleepily.

Will rolls his eyes. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Oh.”

—but winds up drifting off to sleep with her ear resting over his heart, with his fingers carding through her hair.  


End file.
